Bloody Winter: A Pyke Mystery (26 page)

‘Felix? My son?’

They understood that much. John shook his head, frowning.

Pyke wanted to ask them about the Hancocks, whether they’d heard anything about the boy, but he didn’t think they’d understand him.

There was a bang on the door and Megan went over to the window to see who it was. She went to the door and opened it. Must be someone she knew, someone she trusted. Pyke listened. They spoke in Welsh. The woman at the door was agitated, excited even. The husband joined in the conversation, and then indicated to Pyke that he would go next door and fetch their neighbour, who spoke some English. Pyke could tell from the tone of their conversation that something was wrong.

The neighbour came and knelt down next to him. ‘They’ve found a body in Post Office Field.’

‘
Who?
’ Pyke felt as if he had been winded and panic spilled through him, the news he hadn’t wanted to hear.

‘I don’t know.’

‘How far is Post Office Field?’

‘From here? A few minutes.’

Pyke didn’t have to think about it. He staggered to his feet, the pain now a welcome distraction.

A large crowd had built up near the entrance to Post Office Field, an acre of scrubland surrounded by houses. A constable Pyke didn’t recognise was blocking the only route into the place.

Men and women were whispering to one another in a mix of Welsh and English, curious shopkeepers mingling with labourers from the ironworks.

The neighbour turned to him. ‘A woman over there knows the man who found the body. He reckons it’s a young boy.’

Pyke experienced a giddy surge of relief, and then guilt. His thoughts turned to Cathy; he wondered whether she’d heard the news. He heard someone say, ‘Hancock.’

‘It could be the master’s son.’ The neighbour was a Caedraw worker, a furnace-man. He was terrified by the notion.

Pyke imagined the scene, a handful of constables huddled over a corpse, frozen almost solid. He thought about the Hancocks, the worst news a family could receive, the rage and the grief, the devastation they would be feeling. It was the most heartbreaking thing that could happen to a parent, having to bury your child. Nothing would be the same again.

They heard the horses, the rattling of a harness, before they saw the brougham. It turned into the dead end from Victoria Street, the crowd clearing a path before it. It came to a halt, and the driver climbed down and opened the door. There was Jonah Hancock, but no sign of Cathy. Hancock took no notice of the crowd, his expression blank, the muscles of his face clenched tight. The constable let him through; they watched as he crossed the first part of the field.

Pyke reached inside his coat and touched his wound. There was
fresh blood on his fingers. He could hardly feel the pain, though. Why had the kidnappers taken the boy’s life?

The crowd had grown and a hushed reverence had come over them. Death was a regular occurrence for the poor but not for a family like the Hancocks.

Pyke’s thoughts turned to Cathy. She would be distraught, inconsolable. He wanted to see her, comfort her, but he knew this was out of the question. Would the family blame him?

The crowd looked up and everyone was quiet: Jonah Hancock in the distance, carrying the body of his son. Someone next to Pyke began to sob, another joined in. Hancock was closer now, striding carefully, his son’s legs and arms dangling down. Pyke watched his hard expression and wondered whether he could have managed such composure, such dignity, if the corpse had been Felix’s.

Approaching the brougham, Hancock handed the body to the driver, then climbed into the carriage and reclaimed it. The door closed and moments later the brougham rattled off in the direction of Victoria Street.

As soon as the brougham had gone, the mood turned ugly, grief turning to anger. Later the neighbour explained that the people had been talking about the police search of Bathesda Gardens and Quarry Row. Hadn’t they been looking for a child? A few people had put two and two together and had come up with an answer. An Irish mob had killed the Hancock boy. Most of the people there worked, or knew someone who worked, at Caedraw, and it was as if an outsider had come into their community and killed one of their own. No one seemed to like Jonah Hancock but he was the ironmaster and deserved their loyalty.

By the time Pyke left, some of the crowd were shouting for vengeance.

That night, still with no word from Felix, Pyke lay in the downstairs room, imagining the worst. Perhaps it had been seeing William Hancock’s corpse, seeing a father carry his dead son.

John and the neighbour had paid one of the police constables a considerable sum of money. The man had told them,
reassured
them,
promised
them, that Felix wasn’t being held in the station-house, and had never been there. Pyke had given them a physical description
of the clerk who’d directed him to the Southgate Hotel. They were told that the man hadn’t shown up for work. Asked for his home address, the constable had given it to them, but when they had gone there to look for him, they found that the room had been vacated.

Later in the night, Pyke heard the rioting and thought about Felix, possibly out there, alone in a strange country. Pyke could almost feel the hatred, the resentment, the ugliness vibrating in the air. Dosed up on laudanum, he drifted in and out of consciousness, asleep when awake and awake when asleep; shapes, faces, memories moving in and out of focus, their meaning just beyond his reach.

In the morning, the family was told that a mob of more than two hundred, mostly from the Caedraw ironworks, had marched on Quarry Row and Bathesda Gardens. Taken by surprise, the police had been unable to stop them from setting light to the houses. No one seemed to know how widespread the rioting had been but people had died.

Soldiers from the barracks were now patrolling the streets and reinforcements had been summoned from Brecon.

The disturbances had spread to the works themselves, Caedraw
and
Morlais. Someone reported that all of the blast furnaces had gone quiet, the first time this had happened since the strike.

Shops had been attacked and ransacked; rubble and broken glass littered the streets. The town centre was deserted. Two had died. Five had died. Ten had died. More. No one knew. Even in the house, the air smelled of charred wood.

The husband had procured a horse and cart and Pyke had driven to the Castle, each bump, each rut, causing him to wince. The entrance was blocked and Jenkins, one of the agents, was giving orders to two men armed with rifles. Pyke waited for Jenkins to leave and then hobbled up to one of the guards. Thrusting an envelope into the man’s hand, he instructed the man to deliver it at once to Catherine Hancock. The guard asked who he was but Pyke turned without answering, and limped back to the horse and cart.

‘All kinds of rumours, place is wild with ’em,’ the neighbour said, grim-faced.

The husband was sullen and wouldn’t look at Pyke. They were standing across from each other in the downstairs room.

‘Such as?’

‘A man who worked for the Hancocks made off with twenty thousand, meant to be for the kidnappers.’

Pyke assimilated this news without reacting. So the kidnappers hadn’t received the money; and the Hancocks blamed him. Understandable in light of his ‘disappearance’. He thought again about Cathy, whether she’d got his letter, what she must be going through.

‘Apparently the man in question is a policeman from London.’

John tugged the neighbour’s sleeve, said something in Welsh.

‘He wants to know where your money’s from,’ the neighbour said, by way of translation.

Pyke understood now that they thought he was the one who’d stolen from the Hancocks. They were frightened, feeling let down. He looked at the neighbour. ‘Tell him, on the life of my own son, I did not steal any money, nor have I broken the law in any way, shape or form.’

The neighbour stared at him, trying to work out whether or not to believe him. ‘You didn’t answer the question.’

‘Hancock paid me what he’d originally promised.’

‘To negotiate the safe return of his son?’

Pyke nodded. He could see how bad it looked.

The neighbour and John exchanged a few words in Welsh. The former was about to translate, for Pyke’s benefit, when the noise of horses’ hoofs interrupted their conversation. A carriage pulled up outside one of the houses farther up the street, a place Pyke knew to be empty. It was the address given on the note he’d left at the Castle for Cathy. At the window, they watched as four men leapt out of the carriage, smashed through the door with crowbars and stormed into the tiny house. About a minute later, they emerged, clearly agitated, not sure what to do next.

‘Those men were sent by Jonah Hancock.’ Pyke turned to the neighbour. ‘They’re looking for me. If you really think I had something to do with the Hancock boy’s death, or I stole the ransom money, I won’t stop you from going out there and telling them where I am.’

The neighbour translated and the two men discussed what to do,
their eyes darting between Pyke and the activity outside. As they talked Pyke thought about the presence of Hancock’s men and what it indicated – either that Cathy had read his note and passed it on to her husband or that his letter had been delivered directly to Jonah Hancock.

It also told him that the Hancocks were baying for his blood. The police would be looking for him, too.

John spoke. The neighbour waited for him to finish then turned to Pyke. ‘He says you can stay – for the time being.’

Pyke felt another bolt of pain streak up one side of his body. He took a breath and had to steady himself against the wall. In other circumstances, he would have been relieved by this offer, but all he could think about now was his son.

I
n the police wagon, the journey to Cashel took a little under two hours. It was a bumpy, uncomfortable ride made worse by the silence, the two constables not wanting to acknowledge Knox or too afraid to say anything in Hastings’ presence. For his part, the sub-inspector was in a foul mood and refused to tell Knox why he’d been summoned back to the barracks. Knox was too worried about his son to care about his own predicament. Cornwallis had taken his post and his home. What else could they do to him now? Lock him up? Knox tried to think what they might be able to use against him. In his pocket, he felt the two copperplates rattling around and realised his mistake. If they threw him in a cell, they would search him and find the plates. It was difficult not to be overwhelmed by the injustice of it all.

At the barracks, he was led into the front of the building by O’Hanlon and Morgan, but they hadn’t handcuffed him and they didn’t take him to the cells. Instead, they led him upstairs and waited with him in the corridor while the sub-inspector went into his office. Knox heard voices. Then the door opened and he was beckoned inside.

To his surprise, and despite the lateness of the hour, the County Inspector was there, together with a man Knox didn’t recognise.

‘You know the County Inspector, of course,’ Hastings said, once he’d settled into his chair behind the desk. He turned to the stranger. ‘This is Benedict Pierce, the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.’

Pierce nodded at him and even tried to smile. He was a neat, well-groomed man in his late forties, with short dark hair, a cleanly shaven chin and small, quick eyes.

‘The Assistant Commissioner has made the arduous journey from London to look into your unsubstantiated claim that the man found on the estate in Dundrum was one of his men, Detective-inspector Pyke.’

Knox felt his chest tighten. ‘I was given the task of investigating this murder, sir,’ he said to Pierce. ‘I’m a lowly constable with no experience of such matters. I was told I could have four days and it was made clear that I was not to do much. Get rid of the body and let the whole thing drop …’

‘That’s a deuced lie, sir,’ Hastings spluttered, almost knocking over the inkwell on his desk, ‘and I’ll ask you not to repeat it in such august company.’

‘When it became clear I hadn’t followed these orders,’ Knox said, ignoring Hastings, ‘and after it was discovered I’d identified the dead man and contacted his son in Somerset, I was called in here and dismissed.’

‘You were dismissed, as you put it, for aiding and abetting the escape of a suspected thief, and I’ll remind you that such an action could land you in prison, if we were inclined to prosecute.’

The Englishman held up his hand. ‘I’m not here to judge the rights and wrongs of your disciplinary procedures. I just want to know how and why this gentleman came to believe that the corpse was that of one of my men.’

Knox tried to assess whether Pierce would be sympathetic to what he had to say.

‘Perhaps you could tell me about your investigation,’ Pierce said, looking directly at him.

Knox did as he’d been asked and described each stage of his inquiry. He was as frank as he felt he could be, but he didn’t mention his suspicion that Cornwallis had known the dead man. He also didn’t say anything about the daguerreotypes.

‘So do you still have the letters you found in the lodging house – the ones written by Pyke’s son?’ Pierce said, once Knox had finished.

‘I’m afraid not. I was made to give them up to Lord Cornwallis.’

‘What’s his interest in the letters?’ Pierce asked, curious now.

Hastings and the County Inspector had suddenly gone very quiet.

‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him,’ Knox said, gesturing at Hastings.

Pierce ignored the insinuation. ‘And the pistol and knife you found there?’

‘I still have them. I left them at Father Mackey’s house in Clonoulty.’

Pierce looked over at the County Inspector. ‘I will need to inspect them, of course.’

‘I fear you’ve come all this way for nothing,’ Hastings said. ‘I mean, there’s no hard evidence that the deceased was one of your men. By his own admission, Constable Knox is not the finest investigator in the land.’

Pierce considered this. He seemed angry. ‘I could, of course, order the exhumation of the body …’